Janet Adler

Janet Rosalyn Adler was born in Frankfort, Indiana, in 1941 and became a founding figure in somatic practice and Authentic Movement. Rather than building a career in concert dance, she trained as a dance and movement therapist, beginning her work with Marian Chace at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1963. She also studied with Mary Starks Whitehouse, whose inwardly directed "movement-in-depth" practice shaped her thinking, and drew on the somatic epistemology of John Weir. In the late 1960s, Adler worked with autistic children and documented that practice in the film *Looking for Me*.

Beginning in 1969, Adler undertook the sustained inquiry into moving in the presence of a witness that would become the center of her life's work. She founded and directed the Mary Starks Whitehouse Institute in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1981 to 1983—the first school devoted to the study and practice of Authentic Movement. After relocating to Northern California, she produced *Still Looking* in 1988, a film exploring her developing practice, and earned a doctorate in mysticism from the Union Institute in 1992.

Adler formalized the Discipline of Authentic Movement around the evolving consciousness of mover and witness, their relationship, and the development of an "inner witness." From 1986 to 2006, she taught individuals and groups in Northern California and traveled to European students from 1992 to 2001. In 2006 she moved her advanced teaching to Galiano Island, British Columbia, and in 2013 founded Circles of Four, a postgraduate program preparing people to teach the Discipline.

Throughout her career, Adler was also a prolific writer and filmmaker. Her major books include *Arching Backward* (1995), *Offering from the Conscious Body* (2002), and *Intimacy in Emptiness* (2022), edited with Bonnie Morrissey and Paula Sager. She worked in hospice care and co-created a volunteer dying-and-grieving program on Galiano Island. Adler died at her home there on July 19, 2023. Her papers, spanning 1960–2023, are held by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.